“The dead have their own weather. It comes upon the living sudden,
and leaves them changed.” — from an unmarked ledger of the South

by J.C.White

Omohundro was a word the mouth had to muscle through. The road began polite where the grass was barbered and the houses squared themselves like shoe boxes on the earth and the maples kept a straight watch. Then it forgot its manners and ran on. It unspooled beyond the tidy plats into the old part of town where the paint had given up completely and the porch rails knew rot by its nickname and the yards were a grammar of rust.

From there it was a ribbon that bowed under a railroad bridge black with smoke and time, so narrow a car must hover and listen and nose through like a fox at a burrow. The wide and turbulent river there took the bridge’s shadow and gnawed on it. A brick waterworks, older than our fathers’ fathers, crouched under the stone buttresses and watched the Cumberland River boil and remember floods. If you kept on to the far throat of the road you came to the furnace of Nashville itself and the ground there sweated whiskey and gasoline and the night obliged itself to whores and hobo’s with nowhere to sleep who made of their pockets a kingdom.

This is the country of a single afternoon. Summer, nineteen and seventy. The light in the sky had a fever it would not declare. I was six and my brother Mike was seven and we rode our bikes with their bell mouths and clattering chains and we worked our legs like little pistons. The street in front of our house laddered away and the houses held themselves to ordinance and the world wore its shirt tucked in. But the street was a fuse and we were matches. We struck ourselves and went.

The air brooded. Clouds churned in bowls. On our left the good lawns held their smiles like the teeth of dentists. On the right the lots swelled larger and the houses shrank like men in borrowed suits. Poplars with lightning scars. A mailbox leaning like a drunk. Screen doors that shook when we coasted past. Mike’s bike ticked and mine whirred and we spoke little because boys know that language wastes speed. We arrowed toward the bridge where the road crisped into gravel and the dust was the color of old bone. Downriver the water bumped its shoulder against the abutments and the buttresses went up and up a hundred or more feet like the bones of a cathedral laid bare to the sky.

We had ranged that far before. Mothers do not grant such travel but the street itself invited and the summer empowered. There were days we turned back at the first flophouse with its gray clapboard hide and its eyes beaten blind. There were days we dared the bridge and the one-lane throat of it and came out into that other country where men leaned in shadow and women called themselves names not their own. Today we only went as far as the arch’s giant knees and the waterworks that breathed brick. The river shouldered by. Barges hauled their iron breath. We watched and watched longer and the sky stiffened.

We turned home. The road climbed toward a house that had been white once and now wore the gray of old milk. The shingles had gone to the crows. The pickets of the fence were uneven teeth and the chicken wire stapled to them made a thin and stupid armor. The yard was dirt and vague weeds and a single mulberry standing like an apology. Everybody called it the Davis place and when your mouth said Davis your throat tasted whiskey.

Outside the fence at the opened gate was a black man with slicked rain on his brow though the rain had not fallen yet. He was not old and he was not young. The hard life had written his affidavit in his face and still there was a neatness in his mustache and a proud uprightness in his spine like a measure taken by God. In the yard stood Billy Davis, kids called him Devil Davis, with no shirt and the green tattoos to tell a life unlettered and he held a side by side twelve gauge with the barrels like the eyes of judgment. I did not yet know what judgment’s eyes looked like but the gun taught me.

We drew our bikes down to the coasting and then to the wobble and then to the stop. We did not speak. Mike mended himself to the handlebar like a question. The air grew stern and the wind came on as if it had been listening and had resolved itself. The summer flies went to ground. Time leaned. Even the house listened, its yellowed windows dull as old eyes that had seen too much and were begged for more.

The black man in the road spoke first in a careful music, low and coaxing, the kind a man uses with a cornered dog or a father wavering at a belt. “Please, mister. I be on my way. I mean you no harm, sir. No offences meant or taken.”

Davis chewed a cigarette and stared down the barrels as if those two holes were the ends of a thought he preferred. His trousers sagged with black oil and his feet were bare on the porch boards and the boards themselves looked to the nailheads for courage. He told the man that this was his fence and his earth and his air and his right. He told him in words that had the old fever in them and those words were not for children. He called the man what the world had called him to his face and behind his back and I understood not the politics of it but only the wound. The syllables cut like glass.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that word. But it would be the last time I’d ever hear it in the same way.

The black man absorbed the insult with his chin set. He stood outside the gate as if the gate were a line drawn with a bone. He said again he would go with no trouble and he said it the way a man says it to a gun. The wind leaned its shoulder into the trees. Somewhere a dog that had never been pet began to bark toward heaven.

You didn’t see a black man in our street then. Not in the good blocks. If they came it was as a delivery or a warning. This one seemed to belong to no job and no fear. He had on a workshirt that clung to him and pants grayed at the knees and he had the look of one who has walked long and taken no water he did not earn. He breathed and the day breathed with him.

“You get off my fence line, Davis said. You step. I ain’t saying it again.”

The man widened his feet in the road like a small defiance. The chicken gate fretted in its latch. The mulberry said nothing and the house said less. The storm upstream ripped its coat. Thunder like a bar dragged across the sky. The hair along my arms rose as if to remember some ancient covenant between boy and weather. Mike leaned to me. His voice was a saw whisper. “Chris. Don’t.”

A hawk crossed high above us and found nothing to choose between. I could taste iron. I could taste the river and the throat of it.

“Do it then,” the man said. “If you so need it.” His voice changed. Pride or resignation or that fatal humor men keep for their last minutes. He clucked then, a sound from the barnyard, vulgar and holy at once. He folded his hands at the armpits and flapped his elbows like the cheap wings of a carnival bird. He bent his knees and strutted. He called Davis chicken. He made of the old insult a shrine and invited the white man to kneel.

The sky took offense of its own. It grimaced and belched a light that had no patience. A first fat drop hit the dust and raised the wound of its circle and was gone. Then another. Soon the rain came on like thrown gravel. It pocked our skin. It hammered the corrugations of the Davis roof and made an instrument of the world.

The black man undid his shirt buttons and stripped his shirt off like it had been borrowed. He whirled it above his head and the water shook free of it and made a silver ring and he whooped and he danced a little in that wet road as if to insist upon living. My big brother and I stood as if someone had moved the bones out of us and filled us with bees. Davis flicked his cigarette into the yard and the wind tried to make a ship of its ember and failed.

Then the world chose ruin.

Davis mounted the step with the slow ceremony of a man who has decided and cannot be talked back. He hefted the gun and the barrels, dark as a tunnel mouth, centered on the man’s face and chest. When a weapon points at a man it points also at every hour that made him and at every hour he could have had. Davis drew the two triggers together, the way you might pinch off a candle’s twin wicks. The gun went off and the sound was a door slamming in a church and the yard filled with spent thunder and the man’s chest bloomed a red scripture and his head shuddered and the road took him as if it had been waiting. He folded without grace. The rain found him and wore him with rivulets. His limbs had small arguments and then were persuaded.

The smoke from the gun made a wicked incense. The smell of powder bit my tongue. Mike told me not to look and I looked anyway. The world was listing on its keel. I thought if I stared hard enough I could will the dead man back to standing. The rain pinned him there like an exhibit.

Davis lowered the gun and the barrels smoked like winter fenceposts. He looked not proud and not sorry. He looked like a man who had taken a road that offered itself and now saw a second road cut off because of it. Only then did he notice us. His eyes were barnyard blue. He spoke to us without ceremony. “Y’all didn’t see a nothin’.”

We didn’t answer. The rain drummed an answer for us. We began to back our bikes with their clanking chains and skeleton brakes and he took a step off the porch and the porch, in sudden relief of his weight, creaked like a sigh. He took another step into the yard and the chicken wire fence, slick with weather, hummed. He jacked open the shotgun with the practiced cant of his wrists and the wet hulls jumped bright and fell and lay like spent teeth.

He said again “you didn’t see a thing”. He said it louder and the thunder took it away and brought it back a different shape.

Mike found his voice and it came out small and stubborn. “We didn’t see nothing, sir.” The lie had to be paid for and the sky reached to collect.

There came a light so white the world turned into bone. It lifted at Davis’s feet and climbed through him as if he were no more than wick. For a breath he was a figure made of glass. The shotgun flashed and flung and the wire fence spit blue sparks and the mulberry hissed and the smell was of singed hair and cooked pennies and rain steam. Then the light was gone and Billy Davis lay on the near edge of his own yard with smoke ghosting off him like a thought departing. The cigarette he’d flicked earlier guttered into the mud to keep him company.

There are seconds where the heart’s drumhead splits. We stood in the sudden small quiet shocked out of ourselves. The rain slowed as if ashamed of its temper. Somewhere down in the river a barge horn gave a long bereaved sentence. Mike turned his handlebars toward home. We rode. Our wheels wore twin hieroglyphs through the watered dust. The hill fell behind. The bridge legs lifted back into their old patience. The waterworks breathed brick and held our secret.

We did not speak a word on the ride back. The street resumed its better posture, its hedges, its mind-your-hedgerow life. The neighbors’ dogs barked the usual liturgy and a lawnmower tuned the air and a mother called a name for a kid we didn’t know. We racked our bikes against the chain link fence and went inside and learned the news of dinner and of chores and of small domestic wars and if our faces bore anything out of the ordinary the house made no error upon it. Children keep the world’s worst and best confessions. They have small skulls and deep vaults.

That night a storm worked itself out over the city. It hammered some poor man’s roof to teach him thrift he already knew. It leaned against the bridge with a lover’s shoulder. It took the electricity from our block awhile and brought it back by the hem. We lay in our shared room and the lightning stitched the curtains to the wall and unstitched them and from far off came the charitable sirens we made ourselves not name. I saw the light lift Davis’s body again and again on the back of my eyes. The dead black man lay with his face unmade and the rain washed at him as if it could bring the features back if given time. I was six and I had learned two things. That a man can be canceled from the earth in a second by the finger he owns. And that a larger finger writes the last line.

We told no one. Children learn quickly what the world will do with their words. Maybe there were police that came and chalked the road. Maybe the city took both bodies into its cold rooms and gave each a name of sorts. Maybe Devil Davis sat in some ledger as a casualty of weather and the other man sat without a family to claim him and the clerk wrung his hands for him in the way of clerks. We woke the next morning and the air had been scrubbed and the neighbors hosed their driveways with pride and the maples rattled their coinage. Mike and I ate cereal that crackled like grassfires in the bowl and went out and threw a ball until mother called us in and made us comb our hair for church.

Years unfolded. Mike grew up fearless and broken in alternating turns. He would go before me where boys sometimes go. I grew into a man with an official title and a desk that knows the weight of my elbows. I learned the way roads are laid and how money imagines the earth and how a city pretends to be new while its old bones grind underfoot. Words came to me for what I saw that day and yet the words are the poorest miners. They bring back ore but leave the mountain.

I did not tell it. Not to my wife, not to my children. Nashville grew up around the waterworks and swallowed the old lanes in a bigger appetite. The railroad kept its hours. New houses rose farther out with their mouths sooner to the highway. There were other storms and other men who chose and were chosen. Each time I heard thunder there was the sense in it that the sky is no indifferent God but a thing that has watched us too long not to judge us. Pathetic fallacy, they call it in the classrooms. You lend the world your feelings. I would say the world lends them to you and asks the least interest.

Only now do I lay it down. I can see the chicken wire grid and the sallow glint of the barrels and the black man clucking like an old salvation and the rain making coins of the dust and the lightning that lifted Davis clean. There is a hinge in time and I can still feel the hinge turn. The road then as now wills itself forward and a boy must will himself back. These are the entries. Mike and me on those small bicycles, Omohundro’s syllables in our mouths, the world divided between platted lots and the roasted city and two men at the gate of a ruined house measuring what a life is worth with a single tug of finger and a single angry cloud. And the river saying its piece forever without taking sides. And us riding home, wet as river fish, our little spines stiff with freshly stored ghosts, already in training for the long business of silence that men call living.